Global Psychologists for Sane Policy

On Monday, 117 people were arrested for standing on the wrong patch of a paved, public area in Ottawa, Ontario, after trying to access their democratically-elected government.

Meanwhile in Alberta, an undisclosed number of tar-sands executives furthered environmentally-destructive projects that will ultimately kill Canadians via smog and others globally via climate change, and furthered the collapse of Canada’s international reputation, and are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the accomplishment. (Information on salaries at the upper-levels is hard to come by, but a high-school grad working labour in the field makes $00,000-200,000/year. You’ve got to figure their bosses are earning a lot more.)

You know what? That’s just fucking nuts, and I don’t need to be a trained psychologist to say so.

And neither do you!

It got me to thinking–if the bad guys can do it, so can we, right? I mean, a mechanical engineer headed up the Global Climate Coalition; the Renewable Energy Foundation in the UK is an anti-wind front group funded by wealthy landowners living close to proposed wind projects and staffed by non-experts with a long pedigree on anti-wind activism; the Greening Earth Society was a front of the Western Fuels Association–no bias there–with a bunch of coal industry expats on board; Fred Singer headed up the Science and Environmental Policy Project which had as its chair the very same Frederick Seitz who churned out the misleading “science” on the health effects of tobacco for a couple of decades, convincing millions that cigarrettes wouldn’t kill them.

And yet they write up their tidy little press releases on attractive letterhead and sign it very officially, “So-and-So, Head, Made Up Front Group for Coal Lobby,” and the press, pressed for time and apparently none too skeptical these days, runs it. Without comment, without interpretation, without investigation, thus leading the public to believe that the Global Climate Coalition, for example, could correctly distinguish the climate from a kitchen grease-fire.

I have exactly the same credentials in psychology as they have in climate science: which is to say, I’ve read a bunch of pop psychology books, I know some psychologists, I have many excellent and wonderful friends who have been through the psychiatric wringer (irony: those who are actually nuts appear to be universally worth knowing, except for the psychopaths and narcissists; so when did the term become derogatory?). I have subscriptions to psychological magazines. No, I’m not a psychologist, but do you need to be a psychologist to know that it’s completely bananas that our society would rather drive our cars off a cliff than stop driving? That we won’t for the love of the holy trinity touch the sacred treasures of the super-rich for fear of the impacts on the Mighty God of the Economy, but we’ll gladly wrest bread from the mouths of hungry children without apparent reflection that their parents probably, you know, bought that bread, so reducing their ability to buy bread may also not be so great for the GDP? Do I need psychological training to know that there is something fundamentally broken in the brain of anyone who can state with a straight face that since it isn’t entirely politically expedient at this exact moment to ask people to pay the true cost of the things they buy since they’re so used to deep deep discounts that they might revolt, so the global carbon cycle’s just going to have to sit tight and wait until we feel like dealing with CO2?

I don’t think I do.

I think I can safely say that this is crazy.

For the love of Prozac, according to climate experts and scientists, western industrialized nations have until 2020-2025 to decarbonize. That’s not “stabilize carbon emissions” or “reduce carbon emissions by x% below 1990 levels,” that’s “STOP EMITTING ALL CARBON COMPLETELY, FOREVER.” That’s nine years, give or take, and that doesn’t save the climate, it just gives us 66% odds of avoiding complete catastrophe. And the government of Canada, god love ’em, has approved a new coal plant to be commissioned in 2015.

That is fucking nuts.

Oh, but it is a marginally cleaner coal plant that will pollute about as a much as natural gas plant–and we fully expect the global climate, apparently, to pat us on the head, give us an A for effort, and let us off the hook.

So. Welcome to the Global Psychologists for Sane Policy. I am your Host and Head, Chief Diagnosticator of Official and Institutional Stupidity. Please join me. It’s not hard. All you have to do is hurl epithets at world leaders and corporate masterminds running the planet into the ground for a measly thirty pieces of silver, and you probably do this already. If you’d like I’ll give you a title and you can make it more official-sounding.

Because it’s all well and good to stick to the moral high ground, especially since if sea levels keep rising, the moral high ground may be all that’s above water. But ultimately 8 billion people aren’t going to fit on the mountain peaks, so let’s do our part to keep the moral low ground dry too, eh?

It’s my untested belief that expertise in any technical field will result in a near-total loss of respect for journalism.

I know it did for me. The more I learned about climate change, the biodiversity crisis, environmental regulations, and renewable energy, the more I realized that newspaper articles reflected reality only by chance, in passing. More often, an ill-equipped person with good writing skills and no critical thinking ability would write a piece far outside of their education and background by interviewing a bunch of people who claimed to be experts, without evaluating their credentials. We get climate change pieces giving equal weight to well-respected international climate experts and oil-funded PR hacks, pieces on renewable energy with well-reasoned arguments by scientists quoting the best available information and fruit-loop arguments by naturopaths who wouldn’t recognize a herz if it came up and hit them on the head.

And you end up with a voting public almost completely muddled on key issues because they’ve come to the completely totally 100% incontrovertibly WRONG conclusion that there are two sides.

Of course people are entitled to their opinions. I am legally well within my rights to believe that Mars is peopled by winged skeletons who worship Lily Allen. But the legal right to hold an opinion is not the same, and can’t be the same, as the attitude that reality is then required to bend to accommodate that opinion. No matter what I believe, Mars is in fact NOT peopled by winged skeletons who worship Lily Allen, or by anything at all. The experts are right and I am just plain wrong. (Or I would be, if I held that opinion.)

This set of science experiments sheds some light on the psychology of our inherent tendency to give equal weight to two contrary opinions, even when one comes from an expert and the other does not. Fortunately, for those of you who have no intention of purchasing the article for the low-low price of $10, you can also read this fun summation in the Washington Post.

This went on for 256 intervals, so the two individuals got to know each other quite well — and to know one another’s accuracy and skill quite well. Thus, if one member of the group was better than the other, both would pretty clearly notice. And a rational decision, you might think, would be for the less accurate group member to begin to favor the views of the more accurate one — and for the accurate one to favor his or her own assessments.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, report the study authors, “the worse members of each dyad underweighted their partner’s opinion (i.e., assigned less weight to their partner’s opinion than recommended by the optimal model), whereas the better members of each dyad overweighted their partner’s opinion.” Or to put it more bluntly, individuals tended to act “as if they were as good or as bad as their partner” — even when they quite obviously weren’t.

The researchers tried several variations on the experiment, and this “equality bias” didn’t go away. In one case, a “running score” reminded both members of the pair who was faring better (and who worse) at identifying the target — just in case it wasn’t obvious enough already. In another case, the task became much more difficult for one group member than the other, leading to a bigger gap in scores — accentuating differences in performance. And finally, in a third variant, actual money was offered for getting it right.

None of this did away with the “equality bias.”

The research psychologists attribute this to our need to belong to groups and get along with people. It seems that need outweighs any practical consideration, a good deal of the time, including when money is on the line. Fascinating, right? People who are right and know they’re right defer to people they know are wrong in order to get along and maintain group dynamics, even when it costs them to do so.

When it comes to climate change, this is a serious problem.

Aside: Climate change is a real thing that is really happening and is a complete and total catastrophe. There is no debate on this point in any credible scientific circle. If you think that there is, I’m so sorry, but you’ve been had.

/aside

We end up not moving forward with policy solutions because we keep acting like the actual experts and the paid non-expert hacks share some kind of equivalence when they patently don’t.

But–and I’m sure I’m not the only person thinking this–it’s present in every community, including the SBC.

Ah! See? I told you I’d come around to it.

People act as if the opinions and contributions of experts and amateurs are equivalent when they are not.

Thankfully, the fates of human civilization and a minimum of 30% of animal and plant species do not rest on this fact. The worst that happens in most cases is that a person walks around for a good long time in a garment that looks like utter shit and feels really fabulous about it. On a scale of worldwide catastrophe, it doesn’t even rank.

On the other hand, as this science makes pretty clear, an entire generation of sewers are being educated largely by internet celebrities who are too incompetent even to understand how incompetent they are. It’s not a catastrophe, no, but it is a crying shame. And as predicted by the social psychologists, if anyone ever speaks up to point out that some of them are experts and other are, well … not …, they are pilloried as Mean Girls, jelluz haterz, and bullies.

Aside 2: Yep, I count myself in the group of people sometimes wandering happily about in a garment that on later reflection was not up to snuff. It happens. We’re all human. I won’t melt if someone points it out, though tact is always preferred. It doesn’t count as “bravery” to “put yourself out there” if you feel entitled to nothing but praise; and if you’re going to present your work in public you need to be prepared for public criticism.

/aside

So it’s not the end of the world, no, but it’s a detriment to all of us. The people getting the money, in many cases, haven’t earned it; the people with valuable skills to share don’t have the platform to do so; we keep acting as if everyone’s equal when they’re not to be Nice and keep everyone happy, even though not everyone is happy; there are entire boiling lava rivers of resentment and bitterness flowing right under all the green meadows we’re so happily skipping over (in our badly-pressed culottes and boxy tops with peter pan collars, no less). It’s weird. Can’t we, as an online culture, agree that it’s not a violation of the Geneva Convention if someone points out that a hem is crooked or a print isn’t matched? Does it matter if it’s not “nice”? Don’t we all benefit from increased honesty and openness? Do any of us actually expect to be perfect, or need to be treated as if we are perfect in order to function day to day? If you really don’t want people to point out how you fucked up, is it so much to ask that you acknowledge it yourself, then? Hey look at this horrible side seam–I really fucked up!

That went off on a bit of a tangent. Pardon me. Let’s drag it back on track:

The Equality Bias! It makes everything worse while we smile and pretend nothing’s wrong. Fight it!

Naomi’s political lens is so focused that it’s blinding. This is less a book about climate change than it is about why climate change is now the perfect excuse to do everything she’s always wanted to do anyway (eg. scrap globalization, redistribute wealth), which is fine, but she ignores any contrary evidence. For example, she has a brief section on the brief flourishing and untimely death of Ontario’s green energy economy, which she blames 100% on the WTO’s decision on domestic content. The waffling and delays of government regulators on applications, the constant changes in direction, and the dead-set-contrarian politics of the mostly rural ridings where wind energy projects were to be sited were completely overlooked, but as anyone who actually went through the process can tell you, the domestic content reg change was the least of any developer’s worries, and came after years and years of frustrations brought about by the public sector.

She spends a great deal of time criticizing anyone else whose political perspectives change how they perceive climate science and solutions, but is much, much worse herself in this book. No information penetrates unless it conforms with her pre-existing beliefs. But the global carbon cycle is not sentient. It doesn’t care how carbon emissions are reduced; it doesn’t even care if they are reduced at all. It does not vote and has no political preferences. WE do; and so it’s up to us to make some decisions about if and how we’re going to turn things around. It should be a mark of deep shame to any thinking citizen in a democratic society that authoritarian China is pulling so far ahead in the transition to a renewable economy.

The flaws with This Changes Everything can be boiled down to two, major, fundamental issues:

1. She acts as if the private and public spheres were diametric and opposed, rather than almost entirely overlapping. A person who works all day in a corporation then goes home and becomes a voter and consumer. People move back and forth between the private and public sector in terms of employment all the time. We are not talking about two different species–the private, evil homo sapiens determined to ruin the earth at a profit and the loving, public homo sapiens trying desperately to save it. It’s all just people.

2. The public sphere is as complicit in this as the private sphere. The reason we do not have a healthy, thriving renewable energy sector in Ontario right now is because the people of Ontario didn’t want it. They had it, and then put the politicians of the province under so much pressure to gut it that eventually they did to save their mandate. The moratorium on offshore wind projects in Ontario is a perfect example: two (small) corporations were all set to do the assessment work necessary to figure out if their Lake Ontario projects would work or not, but the government made offshore projects in Ontario illegal because the voters in Scarborough demanded it.

This is a terrible book on climate change. You’d be better off reading almost anything else on the subject.